I like the way you construct a clear narrative here, which issues from your position within the MOOC as a participant/observer, and which begins to build a story about participation across two different environments – I wanted to hear more about these, and how they developed, though I realise this probably isn’t possible given the scope of the task.

What I did wonder was the extent to which the Futurelearn space, and the Facebook space, might map differently onto Kozinets’ notions of ‘building’, ‘cruising’, ‘bonding’ and ‘geeking’ communties, as it seems likely that the different ‘consumption activity’ with which each are concerned would have an affect here. Kozinets suggests that there’s a distinction between:

‘Building’ communities (central, unifying interest or activity);
‘Cruising’ ones (weaker social ties and low centrality of consumption activity)
‘Bonding communities’ (strong social ties but weak centrality of consumption activity)
‘Geeking communities’ (high levels of exchange/consumption but weak social ties)

I wonder to what extent the unifying task of creating the film might define the community as a ‘building’ one, whereas you might expect the less focused Futurelearn social space to constitute as something different?

Like PJ, I’d really like to know how this MOOC activity pans out – I’d love to see the final video once it’s produced. Thanks for a really intriguing ethnographic artefact.

This is a really interesting analysis, and the Facebook page sounds like one of the few ‘bottom-up’ community sites that seemed to work well (there was some chatter about a Facebook site in the MOOC I was looking at but it didn’t seem to go anywhere). I wonder why it was different in this case … passion for the topic perhaps?

Lovely film as well, wish I was there!